Downtime February 7th

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5 replies [Last post]
Sun, 02/07/2010 - 6:07pm
Michelle's picture
Michelle
Title: Administrator
Joined: 03/17/2007
Posts: 6090
Downtime February 7th

Once the kids are in bed tonight, I'm going to take the site offline for a while to put in the foundation I need for the community subsites. The subsites themselves won't be finished for a while, but putting the foundation on the live site will let me add data to the subsites and minimize the amount of double entry I need to do.

If all goes well, you won't notice any change on the main site. Once I've poked around and made sure I didn't break the main site, I'll put it online again. Not sure, yet, exactly how long it will take but I'll get the site live again before I go to bed. Smile

Michelle

This is the time to remember, cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold on to, but we won't although we'll want to. -- Billy Joel

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Sun, 02/07/2010 - 11:47pm
#1
Michelle's picture
Michelle
Title: Administrator
Joined: 03/17/2007
Posts: 6090
Re: Downtime February 7th

We're back up again after a couple of hours. As far as I can tell, I didn't break anything on the main site. Posting in the forums seems to be working just fine.

I did change the menus a bit, intentionally, but everything else should look the same. If you find anything broken, please let me know.

It probably seems crazy to have 2 hours of downtime for no visible difference but there are important changes now on the back end that will let me move forward. I'll let everyone know when the subsites are ready to be used. Hopefully soon!

Thanks for your patience,

Michelle

This is the time to remember, cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold on to, but we won't although we'll want to. -- Billy Joel

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Mon, 02/08/2010 - 1:43pm
#2
Mel Smith's picture
Mel Smith
Title: Gardener
Joined: 07/26/2009
Posts: 621
Re: Downtime February 7th

I noticed you being down of course and I see the menus are a little different.

One change that I'm wondering if you should consider is this. When I go to the menu items it takes us to the active topics but I usually don't want that. I always have to make the additional click to get to the list of forums or groups because that's the way I usually find is the navigation I want. After that, I would normally pick the next area I want to get to or see what's currently active. Maybe it's just my personal preference and perhaps that choice is available at the user level and I just haven't looked hard enough?

Not a big thing but just a thought. Do you have the capacity to run simple polls on preference questions like that?

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Mon, 02/08/2010 - 2:43pm
#3
Michelle's picture
Michelle
Title: Administrator
Joined: 03/17/2007
Posts: 6090
Re: Downtime February 7th

I don't have polls running at the moment. The last time I looked at it, it needed a couple hours of my time to get it going and I haven't devoted the time to it, yet.

I do have logs, though, and very few people drill down into the forums. I suspect most are like me who don't pay that much attention to the individual forums unless starting a new post. That's why I put active topics first, so people can jump right in and see the conversations. For people who are only interested in certain forums, there's a select box there to filter the listing. Another reason is that the listing of forums is an extremely slow query and there's nothing I can do right now to make that faster. I'd like the first impression people get of the forums to be a faster loading snapshot of all the discussions going on.

That said, I'm not just going to blow you off. Wink You can get to the forum list page directly by going to http://couleeregiononline.com/forum?quicktabs_3=1#quicktabs-3 . For now, just set a bookmark in your browser. For the future, I'll look into making a block where members can "bookmark" pages that interest them and have quick links to them. I know I saw a module for it; just need to test it out.

Michelle

This is the time to remember, cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold on to, but we won't although we'll want to. -- Billy Joel

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Tue, 02/09/2010 - 5:38pm
#4
Mel Smith's picture
Mel Smith
Title: Gardener
Joined: 07/26/2009
Posts: 621
Re: Downtime February 7th

Just a question... you've mentioned that you would like people to post more but have you considered how far they have to drill down to do that?

Click one... arrive at Coulee Region Home page. Opening view... a banner, three more banners and an advertisement... (whether or not post's appear will depend on how I have my font size set. I usually see the top three posts) Scowl down to the posts and check out the recent posts and maybe decide to go to one.
Click two... arrive at a posted topic. Comment there. Decide you want to start a new post.
Click three... choose Discussion forums. Arrive at another page of recent posts. Choose 'new topic' or do what I do, try to navigate to the catagory by going to 'View all Forums'.
Click four... View all forums, choose the category.
Click five... Debates and hot topics, one of my favorites.
Click Six... New topic There, now I can start!

I know, I'm weird, and I probably think weird, but that's the typical way I get from "Say, I should start a new thread about this", to where I actually start typing my message. In relaying this, I see where I could take some shortcuts and maybe it just takes learning some new ways of interacting with forums (on my part) than what I'm used to, but it seems that the candy's not being put on the bottom shelf where the kids can reach it, but up where you have to actually work to get at it.

You've also mentioned that very few people drill down into the forums, and again, I've noticed that there are other ways to arrive at a place to post which are shorter but I seem to overlook. I've learned to navigate this site and I post, but I have to say that the navigation is quite different than what I was used before.

I hope I'm not coming across as critical or that anything needs changed, but I wonder if others, not familiar with the way this site is constructed, might be getting lost 'on the way to the forum' as I seem to do sometimes?

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Tue, 02/09/2010 - 5:52pm
#5
Michelle's picture
Michelle
Title: Administrator
Joined: 03/17/2007
Posts: 6090
Re: Downtime February 7th

I responded in a new topic because we went totally OT and other folks might not be reading this because of the title being in the past.

http://couleeregiononline.com/forums/how-do-you-use-site

Michelle

This is the time to remember, cause it will not last forever. These are the days to hold on to, but we won't although we'll want to. -- Billy Joel

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